Mark wrote: > Ok, had a bit of a look around, > > What about this setup. > > Two boxes with all the hard drives in them. And all drives iSCSI Targets. A > third Box puts all of the Drives into a mirrored RAIDz setup (one box > mirroring the other, each has a RAIDz zfs zpool). This setup wil be shared > via samba out. > > Does anybody see a problem with this?
Seems reasonable to me. However you haven't said anything about how "third box" is networked to "first box" and "second box". With iSCSI I HIGHLY recommend at least using IPsec AH to that you get integrity protection of the packets - the TCP checksum is not enough. If you care enough to use sha256 checksum with ZFS you should care enough to ensure the data on the wire is checksum strongly too. Also consider that if this was direct attach you would probably be using two separate HBAs so you may want to consider using different physical NICs and or IPMP or other network failover technologies (depending on what hardware you have network wise). I did a similar setup recently where I had a zpool on one machine and created two iscsi targets (using zfs) and then created a mirror using those two luns on another machine. In the end I removed the ZFS pool on the target side and shared out the raw disks with iscsi and build the pool on the initator machine that way. Why ? because I couldn't rationalise to myself what value ZFS was giving me in this particular case since I was sharing the whole disk array. In cases where you aren't sharing the whole array to a single initiator then I can see value in having the iscsi targets be zvols. -- Darren J Moffat _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
